Dressing for a home game used to be more of a plug-and-play approach for the Arizona Coyotes. Pick a suit, pick a tie and you’re off.
“Now you get to actually think about it a little bit more,” Coyotes center Clayton Keller said. “You actually have options.”
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In Arizona, pregame suits have been traded in for a more casual look. Players are free to wear what they want, ties have been ditched, and the entrance to Gila River Arena has turned into a runway, now featuring better lighting, for Coyotes players.
Before the season, Alex Meruelo Jr., the Coyotes’ strategic advisor for business and hockey operations, brought the idea to Arizona captain Oliver Ekman-Larsson, who then discussed a change in dress code for home games with general manager Bill Armstrong and now former head coach Rick Tocchet.
“I thought it would be good,” Ekman-Larsson said. “We’ve got some guys who would enjoy that, would want to show off their fashion sense a bit, and then we’ve got some guys who really don’t care, and they can still wear suits if they want. I think it shows some personality, and fans like to see that.”
It’s a far cry from the NBA, where the pregame walk-ins better resemble runways and players have turned into fashion icons, but for hockey, it’s part of a slight break from a tradition that required suits up until COVID-19 forced players into a bubble in 2020.
The NHL relaxed the dress code when it restarted the 2019-20 season in the Toronto and Edmonton bubbles. It was more of a logistical thing; asking players to pack that many suits for an unknown length of time seemed unnecessary, and while ditching suits still typically led to another form of conformity — polos became common pregame attire — it at least planted a seed that a strict dress code requiring a tie wasn’t needed.
Players liked the more casual fit, and team executives began to realize a player not wearing a tie to a game wasn’t going to impact how hard he worked on the penalty kill later that night.
And so there’s been a slight step back in the strict suit policy in 2020-21. Call it a holdover from the bubble. The Dallas Stars, who spent more time in the Edmonton bubble than any other team, adopted a “bubble casual” policy for the last two months of the season after experimenting with a more relaxed dress code on a road trip to Chicago.
Stars GM Jim Nill said it’s a policy that makes sense with the 2020-21 schedule, which he said is still similar to the bubble in Edmonton, if not more strict when it comes to the road.
“At least in the bubble you could go to a restaurant in the hotel, get together as a team, things like that on the road,” Nill said. “You can’t do that with the world the way it is now. It’s ‘get to the hotel, stay on your floor, go to the rink, repeat.’ And you do that for about three days in each city. It becomes mundane. We did the relaxed dress code just as a way to break up something from the mundane for the players.”
Some teams have relaxed dress codes for specific games or road trips, while others have simply changed the road dress code to matching tracksuits, like the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Stars forward Roope Hintz said it’s a welcome change. That echoes the sentiments of a majority of the league. In the NHL Players’ Association’s 2019-20 player poll, 73 percent of players were in favor of a more relaxed dress code like that of the NBA.
“There’s nothing wrong with suits, but I like it a lot not having to wear one,” Hintz said. “You can actually be yourself and mix it up more.”
Hintz said it’s a policy that, if it continues, allows players to become more of a brand and could create more off-ice opportunities than NHL players have typically been given in the fashion sector.
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“I’ve always dressed a little bit different way than 90 percent of the people, so I can actually dress like who I am,” Hintz said. “I have seen a lot of the pictures of how (NBA players) dress for the games, and I think it’s normal for them to be able to do something else with that.”
The NHL, however, is steeped in tradition. Suits and conformity are expected. Players interviewed for this story had no idea when or why it started, but they did know it’s written in the collective bargaining agreement that they must wear a suit, dress shirt and tie to the arena “unless otherwise specified by the head coach or manager.”
Hockey is also a copycat sport. What’s good for the Toronto Maple Leafs is good for the 12-year-old youth team, which is why even young hockey players, especially if they play in a higher-level league, typically head to tournaments with a shirt and tie or at minimum matching tracksuits.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a nice suit; in fact, some players have been able to better paint a picture of and share their personalities with that canvas than others.
Erik Karlsson was voted one of the NHL’s best-dressed players by his peers in 2019 and said hockey’s growth as a global game, with a higher influx of Europeans in the NHL, has helped push the envelope.
“I think it’s a world thing. Ten, 12 years ago when I came into the league, the dressing was a very different contrast between European and North American guys,” Karlsson said. “Now it’s more similar stuff, but back then the European style was kind of a thing that not most North American guys appreciated or (were) accustomed to wearing it.”
Karlsson points to the proportion of slim-fit suits that NHL players wear. Early in his career, only a handful of North American players, he mentions Jason Spezza, embraced the tighter fit. In general, it was an easy tell on whether a player was born on this side or the other of the Atlantic based on how slim his suit was.
Led by the NBA, player fashion, particularly the pregame walk-in fashion, has sparked an entire industry.
Dex Robinson, an athlete stylist who works primarily with NFL and NBA players, said at this point “hockey isn’t even on the spectrum” of sports fashion.
“When you think of sports fashion, you go NBA, and NFL second, and hockey isn’t even part of it,” Robinson said. “I’ve had maybe three conversations with hockey players, Evander Kane being one of them. He has a solid look, and we connected when he was in Buffalo, and I think he’d be awesome if he was able to spend a little more time focusing on his look, and I think so many more doors would open for him and other hockey players.”
Katia Dragotis is the COO of ProTrending, a company that works with athletes to promote their pregame fashion and sells directly to consumers based on an athlete’s look.
“Athletes have become the influencers when it comes to fashion,” Dragotis said. “When you think of the ideal body type for brands, it’s athletes. And in many ways, it’s even a better fit for hockey players, so if the sport better embraced the fashion world, it already has the right body types.”
Dragotis compared NHL players to defensive players in the NFL. Athletes who typically aren’t getting the most face time are part of more of a unit than an individual but can showcase themselves as a brand when they are off the field walking into a stadium or arena.
“We want to work more with hockey, and I think right now the sport hasn’t really taken that big step yet. We were excited when we saw the NHL relaxed the dress code a bit this year, but it’s just a good first step,” Dragotis said.
Rick Soto is a tailor in Austin, Texas, who works closely with NFL clients, more than a dozen of whom were wearing his threads when they were drafted this year. Soto’s business has grown from a mobile truck to a brick-and-mortar business, partially because of his work with athletes and linebacker-turned-broadcaster Emmanuel Acho.
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“I used to not be much of a believer in the idea that (Instagram) ‘likes’ led to sales, but I’ve changed my mind on that,” Soto said. “I’ve seen sales go up or people contact me when they are ready for that big suit purchase, weddings for example, and they found me because they want to look and dress like what they saw a particular NFL player wear on social media.”
At this point, Soto has limited experience with hockey players — mostly working with the Stars’ AHL affiliate in a north Austin suburb — but said as a tailor, the concept of jumping into the NHL space would be exciting.
“For starters, I’d watch more if that was a bigger part of the culture of the sport. Athletes set the trends, and right now it’s like the NHL doesn’t even participate in the trends,” Soto said. “So if NHL players started putting more together and focusing on it, whether it’s with suits or without suits, they’d have a ton of people ready and willing to work with them.”
One name that kept coming up from those in the fashion industry was Auston Matthews. The Maple Leafs forward and Rocket Richard winner has developed more of a reputation for being more fashion-forward and was once featured in GQ.
“And he’s one of the best players in the world,” Dragotis said. “We need players like that, ones that people want to copy on the ice, to become the ones that people want to copy off the ice. Someone needs to be the face that pushes this.”
One of the next steps overall, Dragotis said, is the buy-in from teams and team photographers in promoting players when they walk into an arena. It’s typical for an NBA or NFL photographer to make sure they are stationed and ready for pregame walk-ins. That’s less common in the NHL, in which teams also don’t promote players nearly as much in that capacity.
Karlsson said it’s a steeper hill to climb than simply relaxing the rules and getting photographers to better promote athletes’ pregame dress.
“I think the culture and the way that everything is with hockey, with the history, I think it’s hard to compare to other pro leagues, in the U.S. especially,” Karlsson said. “In hockey, the culture is a little bit different and you have some guys here and there (who) like to express themselves and take a lot of interest in it, but it’s a minority. So I don’t really know if that’s something that the hockey world would ever really focus on the way that other sports have and do.”
Marc Methot was Karlsson’s defensive partner with the Ottawa Senators and during his career showed more personality than most, particularly with the media.
“I think the NHL is heading in the right direction; it’s not there, and some teams are behind others,” Methot said. “But I think we are at least to the point where it’s no longer 25 robots walking into a game in the same black suit. That’s good for the game because even if a guy still elects to wear a suit when it’s not required, that still says something about his personality and who he is.”
Keller said the Coyotes don’t spend ample time looking at the social media reaction to their pregame outfits, but it has created some buzz and additional fan interaction in a year in which fan interaction has been extremely limited because of social distancing.
“It can bring some new eyes to the sport, that’s for sure,” Keller said. “If you can dress and grab attention like some of the guys from the other sports, maybe you start bringing some of those people to watch hockey.”
Ekman-Larsson is hopeful the relaxed dress code in Arizona will spark a long-term trend in the NHL.
“It would be good for the sport if that happened,” he said. “I think it just helps connect the game more with everyone and shows a bit more who we are as people.”
(Top photos: Mark Blinch/NHLI via Getty Images)
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Category: WHY
